by Paul Johnson
‘Shit!’ I stopped to leave Rothmann with the soldier carrying his legs, then waved more of the turbaned men forward. ‘Cover me!’ I put down my Kalashnikov and charged to the door. Bullets ricocheted from the steel surface, whistling past me.
Colonel Singh was clutching his legs and groaning. I grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him away, then went back for the grenades, which had spilled from his grip. There was a heap of earth about ten yards from the door and we took cover behind it.
‘You play cricket, sir?’ the colonel asked, extending an arm.
‘Not since school. Why?’
He took one of the grenades and pulled the pin with his teeth. ‘Leave to me, then. I am superb fielder.’
I took his word for it and watched as the grenade looped through the air. It exploded just before it reached the metal panels.
‘Good shot!’ I said.
‘Not good enough.’ The colonel pulled, waited and threw again.
The blast was centered on the door, but it still didn’t break it. The firing behind us seemed to be increasing in ferocity.
‘Last chance,’ he grunted, then dispatched the third grenade.
This time the door swung open in two pieces.
‘Go,’ Colonel Singh said, signaling to his men. ‘We will cover you.’
I wanted to thank him, but there wasn’t time. I heaved Rothmann over my shoulder. It was only when I reached the door that I realized I’d left my Kalashnikov behind. A rattle of shots made me keep going.
Beyond the exit, there was a lift similar to the one on the other side. It was striking that there were no men in fatigues waiting-perhaps nobody had given us a chance against the defenders. I hit the call button. The mechanism kicked in immediately.
Rothmann was panting, even though he hadn’t been carrying any heavy weights recently. I swung him to the floor, opened the door to the cage and pulled him in. The only option apart from H for Hades was G, which I presumed was ground level. We were there in less than a minute. I opened the door and was confronted by another steel panel, but this one had a button to the right-hand side.
The door opened onto a patch of muddy ground. The pale light of early morning was trying to break through a layer of mist. Although we were inside the compound, there was only a low wall in front of us. I picked Rothmann up again and ran toward it, levering him over. When I joined him, I saw a large yellow digger straight ahead of us, and the fence about thirty yards beyond it.
‘Can…can you…drive that thing?’ Rothmann asked, as I jogged toward the vehicle with him on my shoulder.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, thinking of my friend Dave Cummings. He had owned a demolition company and had given me sessions on his various machines. I scrambled into the cab and hauled Rothmann up beside me. As was often the case with heavy equipment, the keys had been left in the ignition. I fired up the engine, struggled a bit to find a gear and then veered toward the fence.
‘More speed!’ Rothmann yelled.
‘Fuck you!’ I replied, the gas pedal already on the floor.
We had enough speed, though we took a long stretch of wire with us. Alarms started honking and I heard some shots in the distance, but we were clear. I stood up in the cab and tried to get my bearings. A line of trees in the distance looked like they might be alongside the road, so I headed for them. Sure enough, the SUV Sara had been driving soon came in sight through the mist. In a couple of minutes, we were there. I stopped the digger and killed the engine, then jumped down.
‘Well, well,’ said a familiar voice. ‘If it isn’t James Bond the Second.’
Gordy Lister had appeared from behind the Highlander, a machine-pistol in one hand and a snub-nosed revolver in the other. Mary Upson was at his side-at least she didn’t seem to be armed, but there was blood on her shirt.
‘Hold it right there!’ Gordy ordered. He glanced up at the cab. ‘That goes for you, too, Master.’ He pronounced the title as if he’d just sucked a lime.
‘Come over here and help me down,’ Rothmann said. ‘I’m wounded.’
‘Like I give a shit.’ The diminutive man turned back to me. ‘Where’s the bitch?’
I was looking at Mary. She seemed less than connected to what was going on-hardly surprising after what she had been through in the rite. I turned back to Lister. ‘You mean-’
‘I mean the blonde bitch who killed my brother.’ The machine-pistol was waving around in his grip.
‘Dead,’ I said, pointing to my fatigues. ‘This is her blood.’
Lister stared at Rothmann, who confirmed what I’d said. ‘Where are you going, Wells?’
I was heading for the SUV. ‘He needs to get to hospital.’
‘Help me down, Gordy,’ Rothmann said, easing his legs toward the ground and gasping. ‘Now, man!’
I had opened the door in advance of moving the Highlander closer to the digger when the shot rang out. By the time I turned, Rothmann had slid to the ground, blood pumping from his head. Mary started to cry and I went over to her.
‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ I demanded, shading Mary’s line of sight.
‘He’d lost it completely,’ Lister said. ‘Fucking Master of the Antichurch of Lucifer fucking Triumphant. Last thing I needed was him spouting all kinds of shit about me to the Feds. Besides, if I’d never hooked up with him, Mikey would still be alive.’ He paused, staring toward the camp. ‘Who the hell are those guys?’
I looked past Mary’s head and saw a group of turbaned troops exiting the camp by the hole I’d made in the fence.
‘Indian Army,’ I said.
‘Say what?’ Gordy ran to the car I’d seen him and Mary in before. ‘Geronimo, my ass.’
He disappeared into the mist.
Jimmy Vlastos raised the blind in his bedroom and looked out over the rooftops of Astoria. It was a clear morning and the sky was pale blue, thin layers of cloud furrowing high above the planes taking off and landing at La Guardia. The sound of bouzouki music drifted up from the apartment below-his neighbors were economic refugees from the fatherland who were still homesick. Vlastos stretched his shoulders and saw an elderly woman staring at him from the opposite block. He looked down, suddenly aware of his nakedness and his half-mast morning glory. He kept his arms high and grinned at the peeper. Then he remembered the last time he’d been naked in front of a fully dressed woman.
Who was she, the blonde with the knife and the Ruger? He’d put the word out, but nothing had come back. Obviously she was a pro, but why would a pro have been hired to tell him about the scumbag who had raped his cousin Eleftheria? The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that she had acted independently. But why? As it turned out, things had fallen neatly into place. His relationship with the Colombians had been getting problematic-they didn’t like the credit he gave some customers and he was tired of being pushed around. Taking the wire cutters to Alonso Larengo’s nuts had been a big risk, and letting Ria watch could have made things worse. As it was, the Colombians had been happy to get rid of the increasingly erratic Larengo, who hadn’t been seen since he staggered out of the repair shop off Hazen that Jimmy had taken over for the night. He was probably in bits in the East River by now.
But Jimmy hadn’t been able to get the blonde out of his mind. There was something about her, a vulnerability beneath the stone-hard exterior, that had made him want to help her. He didn’t like being in other people’s debt, especially since he reckoned the Colombians had actually hired her to kill him-they had hinted as much, saying that Alonso Larengo didn’t have a high opinion of him. If that was the case, she’d taken a big chance. You didn’t want to fuck with people who hired killers-even the brokers had been known to set up hits on hired guns who stepped out of line.
Vlastos made himself a Greek coffee, stirring the mixture in the briki as it came to the boil like his mama had shown him. The aroma made his nostrils twitch in anticipation and he burned his lip when he tried a sip too soon.
‘Gamoto!’ he ye
lled. He ran his tongue over the burnt area. But still the woman with the short blond hair and the high cheekbones stayed with him. Her easy skill with the weapons and her mastery of him should have turned him off. What the fuck was wrong with him? The bitch would have shot him without a moment’s hesitation if he’d made a move. Christ, she’d shot the gun out of his hand to teach him a lesson. He should have put a contract out on her for that humiliation, even though no one else had witnessed it. What if she had talked?
But he knew she hadn’t. For some reason, she had acted as his guardian angel. He couldn’t forget that.
Jimmy Vlastos was in love with a ghost. For that reason, he would act on the request he had received from her by email. If killing Xavier Marias-whoever the hell he was-would improve his standing with the blonde, he’d do it in an instant.
‘Come on,’ I said to Mary Upson. ‘This place isn’t safe.’ I turned to Colonel Singh, who was being held up by two of his men. ‘I’m going to get help. Can you hold on here?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’ He eyed the line of trees on the other side of the road. ‘I am seeing a very adequate defensive position.’
I left him to it, taking Mary’s arm and leading her to the Toyota’s passenger door. I put the Kalashnikov on the backseat, catching sight of the rucksack that Sara had left there. The edge of Abaddon’s laptop was sticking out. I started the engine and checked the sat nav monitor. The next town was less than ten miles away.
‘You don’t have a cell phone, do you?’
Mary shook her head. ‘I wasn’t wearing much on the cross, if you remember.’
‘Shit, sorry.’ I looked over my shoulder and pulled away. ‘Are you okay?’
She raised her shoulders. ‘I guess.’
‘I’m sorry about your mother.’
‘Yes, well, I suppose she went the way she wanted.’
I thought of the elderly woman’s self-inflicted death, her body falling into the coffin. ‘I’m sure she’d been conditioned.’
Mary laughed bitterly. ‘I’m sure she hadn’t. She’d become very strange.’ She let out a sigh. ‘It’s me who should be sorry, Matt.’ She touched my arm lightly. ‘I didn’t realize Gordy was going to shoot at you and that woman from the car. He fired at you in the barn, as well.’
I remembered the look on her face as she’d driven past us. ‘It’s all right. I imagine you thought I was responsible for your mother’s death.’
She took her hand away and bowed her head. ‘No, Matt, it wasn’t that. I…I was jealous. You and the blonde woman looked so…I don’t know…so right together, as if you’d known each other for years.’
I should have realized that Mary would have been jealous. That had been why she had betrayed me after I’d escaped from the camp in Maine.
‘Who was she?’ Mary asked softly. ‘Where is she now?’
I told her, the answer to the former question needing rather more words than the latter. I had a flash of Sara’s body as I’d left it on the roof in Hades. What would happen to it?
When I’d finished, we were approaching the small town. Mary dabbed her eyes with the cuff of her shirt.
‘I’m…I’m so sorry, Matt. Now you’ve lost them both.’
I tried to banish that thought from my mind, not least because putting Karen and Sara together felt disrespectful to the mother of my son. But she was right-they had all gone into the darkness and I, in my desolation, was left in the light.
‘What now?’ Mary asked, as I pulled up at a pay phone.
‘I’m calling the FBI. You can make a run for it if you like, but you haven’t got anything to hide. I won’t tell them about you and Gordy.’
She looked around, taking in the clapboard houses and the almost deserted main street. ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll back up whatever you say.’
I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that easy. There was a lot she didn’t know, and Peter Sebastian would go through my story with a fine-tooth comb. I got out and headed for the phone, catching another glimpse of the rucksack. If I wanted to find out who had hired Abaddon, and who was behind the camp and the Hades complex, I needed to see what else I could find in the laptop.
Ah, fuck it, I thought. I was tired and I was hurting inside. I’d turn the computer over to the Feds and let them work it out. Mary was right. It was time to be straight. There had been too many secrets and lies.
Arthur Bimsdale had been lying on the sofa in Peter Sebastian’s office, completely unconcerned by what he had been ordered to do with his boss, when his cell phone sparked into life. He glanced at the clock on the wall. 7:20. It was time to start the first working day of his new life. Five minutes later, he had registered the news from Texas, spoken to the Acting Director of Violent Crime (an over-the-hill bureaucrat who hadn’t even gotten into the office yet), and arranged a Bureau plane to fly him to Waco. He would be picked up there by an agent from the Dallas field office, which was liaising with the Houston team.
In the car to the airport, Bimsdale ran through what had happened in the last twelve hours. Although he had begun to realize that Sebastian was acting inappropriately, the speed with which events had taken place had come as a surprise. The secret training given to CIA operatives working inside other government agencies had stressed that nothing might happen for long periods, but also that everything could change in the space of a few hours. When he’d been recruited at Yale by the Agency (he’d never got used to calling it the Company, as the old hands did), he had been happy to be included in the so-called Double Helix branch-operatives whose first loyalty was to the CIA, but who would take career positions elsewhere. He was never bothered by the idea that, technically, he was a turncoat. The country’s security took priority over all other considerations.
He looked at the Potomac as it slid seaward under the George Mason Memorial Bridge. That water was where Peter Sebastian’s grip on the Rothmann case had begun to loosen. If the Nazi conspirator had been found after jumping from his boat into the Anacostia River, things would have been very different. The attack on the President would probably have gone ahead-it was unclear whether the conditioning program developed by Rothmann’s sister could be reversed on the spot, and Rothmann himself might have refused to give such a command. But subsequently, if he had been in custody, so many complications could have been avoided. The Agency would have found a way to take charge of Rothmann, probably arguing that he was technically a foreigner because his father had been illicitly allowed into the U.S. (by the CIA itself, but never mind-there had been orders from the White House). He would have revealed all he knew about the conditioning program, whether he wanted to or not-modern truth drugs were very effective-and his infantile Antichurch would have been terminally disrupted.
As it was, Sebastian had been reduced to using the clearly unstable Englishman, Matt Wells. From the little he had been told earlier, there had been a slaughter at a facility that should never have come to light and Heinz Rothmann was dead, which was hardly the optimal result. It was unclear whether Wells had killed him as threatened. He should never have been employed to find Rothmann, given what had happened to his partner and their son.
Arthur Bimsdale sat back in his seat as the terminal loomed, aircraft speeding skyward like his career.
Thirty-Four
After I spoke to the special agent in charge in Houston, I went back to the SUV and booted up the laptop-fortunately its battery still had some juice. I had realized I couldn’t just let things lie. I remembered that Sara had mentioned her broker, Havi, who had been in contact with Abaddon.
‘What are you doing?’ Mary asked.
‘Trying to find out who was behind the Hitler’s Hitman killings.’ Sara had left a file on the desktop containing her broker Havi’s email address. I considered sending him a message, but I reckoned he’d be too smart to let me get anywhere near him. I could hardly ask who had contracted Abaddon and expect a straight answer. Then I had another thought. I checked that the wireless connection was functioning and sent a mes
sage to my friend Roger van Zandt, a computer expert, in London-my memory was as erratic as ever, unable to provide my dead son’s name, but full of less essential data. I asked Rog to find out if a mailing address had been registered for the email account. It was a long shot but, even if Havi had given a bogus address, Rog might be able to follow the routing to the real location.
‘Why are you doing this, Matt?’ Mary asked, when I shut down the computer. ‘Surely the FBI can handle things from here.’
I’d thought about that. In principle, they could, but Rothmann had managed to get his niece close to Peter Sebastian, so I wasn’t convinced. There was also the fact that I was on my own, with nothing else to do with my life. I hadn’t been able to avenge myself on Rothmann and I felt seriously unfulfilled-someone still had to pay for what had happened to Karen and our son.
Mary touched my hand. ‘Matt, you have to let them go.’
I wasn’t impressed that my feelings were so obvious, but she was right. I could still see the ones I’d lost, but their faces were blurred and they no longer came close. Soon the darkness would swallow them up completely. I had no idea how I’d cope then.
I forced myself back to the small town in Texas, which was showing more signs of activity now. I had a decision to make. Either I handed the laptop over with the rest of the gear, or I kept it from the FBI. I looked at my watch. It was nearly 8:30. The advance guard from the Dallas office would be arriving at the camp soon. I decided on a compromise.
A mile before the turnoff, I stopped. I put the computer in the rucksack and stashed it behind a tree at the roadside.
‘I presume I didn’t see that,’ Mary said, with a weak smile.
‘You presume right, if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I don’t, Matt. After all we’ve been through…’
That was some kind of invitation. I didn’t respond. Mary was a good woman, but I had nothing to give her.
